Canada’s polar bears are also thriving thanks to a free market in bears If you’re a polar bear, especially a Canadian polar bear, you are living in the best of places and in the best of times. Your ancestors suffered through prolonged periods of wanton hunting that in places decimated their numbers around the turn […]

Media sisterhood keeps class-warfare debate alive Is it not of deep moral concern that figures such as Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje take more than their fair share of the Canadian literary “pie”? I must admit that I haven’t analyzed the figures — I’ll leave that to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives — but […]

Higher prices aren’t ‘gouging,’ but an incentive to bring more supply Is it not fascinating that when disasters such as superstorm Sandy strike, politicians of all stripes immediately reject the most effective, market-based, responses to shortages and reach for command-and-control methods, with predictably Soviet results? Both the Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, and […]

Property rights benefit the whole world In his recent FP Comment article, “SOEs: a struggle over values” (Oct. 27), Edy Wong of the Alberta School of Business mused about how the Canada-China economic relationship might progress. He characterized the current debate over the possible CNOOC takeover of Nexen as a struggle over values and “between […]

Chief executives need a lesson in basic economics ‘Free markets” is a major theme in this year’s U.S. presidential election. Mitt Romney presses its importance for economic growth. In contrast, Barack Obama argues for a strong government role in redistributing wealth and picking “strategic” industries such as manufacturing and alternative energy. The role of government […]

Adam Smith’s concept involves co-ordination beyond comprehension The increasing clout of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and of other nations’ sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) has led to a good deal of speculation about whether some new model of “visible hand” is about to replace Adam Smith’s invisible, free-market version. The immediate focus of Canadian interest is […]

Why centralize? The best national strategy is no strategy You’ve probably heard it hundreds of times: “Canada is the only G8 country without a national [fill in the blank] strategy.” Of course, the speaker’s true concern is not that Canada is without a strategy, but that it is without his or her preferred strategy. The […]